RBC Letter

We can live without house or clothing
for months, we can live without food for days, but to live
without water is figured in terms of hours and minutes.

It is something we seldom think about. Water is common,
easily accessible, and cheap. It is cheaper than dirt; you
can buy water in our cities, delivered by tap to your bath
and sink, for about a nickel a ton, while just ordinary dirt
fill costs from a dollar up, and topsoil comes at around $10.

It is only when a crisis occurs that we realize our dependence
upon water. Even then we mostly take stopgap measures such
as prohibiting the watering of lawns or shutting off the supply
for a few hours a day, or, as in New York recently, going
without shaving on one day a week.

In a paragraph, here are ten of the most important uses
of water, every one of which has been the basis of hundreds
of volumes of technical writing: moisture in the air makes
organic life possible; drinking water is our greatest physical
need; plants, from lowly lichens in Niagara Gorge to giant
Douglas firs of British Columbia, grow only where there is
water; the sea is the home of fish and of other food used
by men; steam power and electricity depend on water; mechanical
and chemical processes in industry need water; from earliest
times, water has provided men with a means of transportation;
water dictates the location of cities and farms; in the form
of ice, water is used universally for cooling and preserving;
water is the great determinant of political boundaries.

With so many demands upon it, there naturally is competition
between one use and another. Sometimes municipal or provincial
or federal governments must step in and establish priorities.
They may prohibit street washing, or reduce withdrawal for
electric power generating, or ration the supply to industries.

Our disregard of the importance of rainfall and water supply
has become a dangerous influence in our civilization. It leads
to faulty economic ideas, confuses our thinking about colonization
and immigration, blinds us to the consequences of building
bigger and bigger cities, and leads us into wrong judgments
about the location and prospects of factories.

Water is benevolent, when properly managed. It can be productive
and will support prosperous communities if its flow is wisely
used. Our water problems are the outcome of our efforts to
adapt our physical environment to our economic and social
needs, without reckoning sufficiently on nature's unchanging
ways.

By drying up marshes and lakes we have destroyed the homes
and breeding grounds of useful waterfowl and furbearers.
By clearing lake and stream banks of bushes we have exposed
the water to sunshine, warming it so that it is spoiled for
the best fish life. By denuding hillsides of trees we have
increased water wastage and lowered the water level in great
areas, making it impossible for the roots of food plants to
find moisture. By inadequate management, we run short of water
flow for production of electricity, as in Ontario last year,
and of water depth for navigation, as in the Lachine Canal
last year.

There's Beauty in Water

We should not become so wrapped up in the utilitarian use
of water that we forget its contribution to the beauty of
our surroundings. Imagine the barrenness of a world without
water!

Water is the source of all the changefulness we see in clouds,
and the reflector of wonderful shades of light and shadow.
Water modelled our earth's surface, chiselled our Canadian
mountain crags into grace, and at the appropriate season throws
a mantle of white around them. Every river that flows has
something worthy to be loved, from the inchdeep streamlet
beside a British Columbia mountain road to the massy and silent
march of the St. Lawrence as it sweeps around Anticosti Island.

Poets, philosophers and movie makers alike have chosen the
banks of rivers on which to sing of love, to escape from everyday
things into meditation about their high desires, and to stage
drama amid beautiful settings. Everyone knows how much more
pleasant a railway journey becomes when the train follows
the course of a river. We have all seen how idlers in a town
choose a bridge for their passing of time, or sit on the edge
of a dock with their feet hanging over the water.

Charles Darwin, the great naturalist who gave his life to
such studies as The Origin of Species, once wrote to
his wife about falling asleep beside a brook. "I awoke with
a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running
up the tree, and some woodpeckers laughing; and it was as
pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw; and I did not care
one penny how any of the birds or beasts had been formed."

That is what brooks do to the observant person. They whisper
an old tale, or give birth to a new one; they play a soft
obbligato to a bird's song, or they chatter boisterously about
things only they know.

But we, happy as we should be to linger, must occupy ourselves
with aspects of water more serious and workaday.

In the Beginning

All the water available to man is derived from the condensed
vapour of the atmosphere. An important step forward in the
science of hydrology (which is concerned with the properties
and distribution of water) was taken in recent years. It was
recognition of the fact that the distribution and transport
of water obey a fundamental law of equilibrium. This relationship
is called the hydrologic cycle. It represents the balance
of water that exists between (1) oceans, lakes, streams and
underground waters, (2) the solid part of the earth, and (3)
the atmosphere.

Water is ceaselessly circulating from the earth to the atmosphere
and back to the earth again. Evaporating from ponds, streams,
lakes, rivers and oceans, it forms water vapour in the air;
this condenses to form clouds, and later falls back to the
earth as rain.

Rain which falls on the land is disposed of in some or all
of four ways: some evaporates directly, some is held in the
surface soil and subsequently evaporated by plants, some filters
through the top layers and passes to the rocky strata beneath,
and some runs off into rivers and streams. The amount of rainfall
available for the good of humanity is determined by the temperature,
the nature of the land surface, vegetation, and other geographical
features.

That part of the rainfall that is absorbed by the ground
is of very great importance. It sinks down until it joins
the vast underground reservoir of water that exists under
practically all of the earth's surface. It is this groundwater,
as it is called, that feeds springs and wells and rivers.
It furnishes water to plants by capillary action. It dissolves
mineral matter out of the soil, thus supplying food to the
plants.

The only way to get more water for our use is to intercept
it in the runoff, and this is the prime feature of conservation.

It is obvious that there is little use in crying for rain
if we then allow it to wash across our fields and make its
quickest way to the sea along some river bed. Man's limited
comprehension has wasted millions of acres of land, caused
sharp drops in crop yields, starved cattle, spread deserts
over the face of the earth, and devastated industrial areas.

Canada's Water Supply

Some persons have expressed the belief that our water supply
is decreasing. Their opinion is based upon such facts as were
revealed in Ontario surveys a few years ago. Within the last
one hundred years between 80 and 85 per cent of once permanently
flowing streams have become temporary, drying up for at least
part of a normal summer.

But our earth's water resource is permanent and indestructible;
it is the amount available at a place or at a time that is
changing. Demand is rising in response to population growth,
industrial progress, and rising standard of living. Such developments
as air conditioning and the spread of rural electrification
create great new needs for water.

These are legitimate changes. E. NewtonWhite expresses
the opinion in his textbook Canadian Restoration that
they could have been effected without damage or loss, if made
wisely and carefully. But by removing natural barriers we
have speeded the water movement so that it does not reach
the ground water reservoir. Water runs so fast across our
land that it picks up soil and carries it away out of economic
reach.

So, in spite of the fact that Canada is richly endowed with
water resources, we have no room for complacency. We have
228,307 square miles of fresh water within our boundaries.
Lake Superior, forming part of our southern border, is the
largest body of fresh water in the world. We have great rivers.
The Mackenzie, our longest, reaches 2,514 miles from Great
Slave Lake to the Arctic Ocean; the St. Lawrence and the Great
Lakes provide a shipping waterway 2,338 miles long from the
Strait of Belle Isle to the head of Lake Superior, the heart
of the continent. Our seacoast is one of the longest of any
country in the world, with 14,820 miles of mainland sea frontage
and 34,650 miles of island frontage.

Enough, one might think, to minister to all human needs.
Enough to give us the moisture that dissolves the oxygen we
breathe, to liquefy the food we eat so that it can be digested,
enough to supply our health and industrial needs.

But look at the demands made upon it. Three hundred tons
of rainfall properly used are required to grow one ton of
corn, and it requires 700 gallons a day to supply the demands
of every person for food and the other necessities and amenities.

To bring all the needed water to cities is a tremendous
undertaking. Ancient Rome had eleven aqueducts bringing a
daily supply of 40 million gallons to its one million people.
That was the same average per day as in Montreal in 1869,
but today's water supply for Montreal averages 120 gallons
per person per day, just about the same as Toronto's. New
York needs 1.2 billion gallons a day.

When Water Runs Short

There is, without doubt, a serious situation in regard to
water in many parts of the world. Scarcity of drinkable or
otherwise usable water is fast becoming the limiting factor
in the expansion of agriculture and industry and the growth
of communities. Many a city and town that only a few years
ago had adequate reservoir capacity is finding that an unexpected
increase in population taxes its water supply. The farmer
finds that he must dig deeper wells. In some places, where
water is drawn from artificial reservoirs, silt is being carried
from eroded watersheds to fill up the storage capacity.

But we are very trustful. It is difficult to awaken interest
in water conservation. We are, on the whole, much like the
mouse in Gustav Eckstein's popular book Everyday Miracle.
This mouse would lean out under a water tap that was shut
off, and return again and again, confident that sooner or
later someone would turn on the tap and let a drop fall. Dr.
Eckstein doesn't say it was the same mouse, but one mouse
did come finally to drinking ink.

New York's plight of recent months is noteworthy only because
it is on such a large scale. Many other cities suffer in a
degree only less because of their relative size.

Around Baltimore the underground water level has fallen
so low that a well must be drilled 146 feet deeper than in
1916. William Vogt, of Road to Survival fame, says
"one of the most asinine wastes in history was in California's
Santa Clara Valley." Artesian resources were tapped for irrigation,
nothing was done to preserve the source of the water, and
after about thirty years the water gave out. The last artesian
well ceased flowing in 1930. With the supporting water gone,
the valley floor itself sank five feet in twenty years, doing
millions of dollars worth of damage. But nothing was done
to help. In 1922 they voted down a $4 million conservation
plan, and in the twenty succeeding years they spent $16 million
for new wells and equipment. Not until salt water from San
Francisco Bay started seeping into their pumps did they do
something about getting rain water back into the ground.

Instead of working from rockbottom up, and from the
mountaintop down, to build a sure supply of water, there
are some who propose fantastic expedients. There's lots of
water in the ocean, say some, so why not distil it? The answer
is, in part, contained in a paper presented to the United
Nations Economic and Social Council last August: cost. Estimates
vary from 25 cents to $1.25 per 1,000 gallons. Take the modest
estimate half way between these figures, and New York's cost
would be about $350 million a year.

Others suggest the feasibility of collecting dew. That was
a system used in ancient Britain, and dew ponds are still
to be seen on the chalk hills. The suggestion was brought
seriously before the United Nations Economic and Social Council
last year, and the United States representative was forced
to admit that dew was not recognized as a source of water
supply even in the western arid regions.

The Other Extreme

An excess of water can be almost as bad as a shortage. Tropical
rain forests and swamp land are unfit for permanent settlement.
Even passing floods make life miserable for many cities and
farm districts.

In recent floods, such as those in 1936 and 1937 at Port
Hope, in 1937 at London, the 1946 overflow of the South Sydenham
and other streams, and especially the 1947 floods in southwestern
Ontario, there was considerable damage, besides hardship and
interruption of communication.

In parts of the United States, nature's balance has been
upset all the way from mountain top to valley floor, and the
loss through flood and sedimentation averages $300 million
a year. Soildepleting farm practices, the irresponsible
cutting of trees, and general laxity in preventing erosion
have contributed to flooding.

Even where there is abundant water, and not too much, men
seem to be perversely determined to ruin it. They saturate
it with millions of tons of filthy waste. Our coasts and our
rivers are dotted with the rotting bath houses and bathing
enclosures of oncebeautiful beaches, where the signs
read: "No swimming. Polluted water."

Safe water "in the raw" is available on a relatively small
portion of our 3,690,000 square miles, mostly in the high
plateaus and mountain ranges beyond the reach of settlement.
Only there, where the water has been filtered in its passage
through layers of virgin soil, or washed down from a melting
snowbank or glacier, can a person feel quite safe in drinking
from a spring, pool, lake or stream.

The harmful effects of polluted water fall into three broad
categories: dangers to human health, direct economic losses,
and damage to recreational resources. The most important impurity,
of course, is the presence of bacteria.

This is a national problem, varying in importance by river
basins and by localities. In some drainage basins, municipal
sewage contributes most to the impurity of the water, while
elsewhere the damage is done by mining and industrial operations.

Obviously, it will not do to stand idly by while mountains
of germridden garbage are dumped into our waterways.
Not only we, but game and fish suffer. Even irrigation water
drawn from polluted streams may carry lethal germs to vegetable
products and spread disease.

Our Obligations

It must be obvious by this time that natural laws impose
limitations and obligations upon us. Whether it is convenient
or not, whether it is politically expedient or not, water
is going to run downhill and its destructive force is going
to increase with the rate of runoff; water is going to become
impure if we pour impurities into it; water tables are going
to sink if we pump water out of them and turn aside the replenishment
that is their due.

Even if nature were benevolent instead of rigidly and logically
impartial, she could not restore the lost soil short of that
infinitely slow process by which soil was formed in the first
place from the foundation rocks of the world, nor can she
overcome by her mild processes the rabid poisoning carried
on so ruthlessly by human beings.

The classic examples of civilizations wiped out by their
misuse of water and soil are the once mighty, now buried,
civilizations of Babylonia and Assyria, and the colossal destruction
wrought in the once rich soils of the vast regions of northwest
China. Erosion destroyed or sapped all the Mediterranean civilizations,
past and present, from Athens and Rome to Italy and Spain,
to say nothing of the formerly fertile plains of North Africa
where once flourished great Carthage.

We, in this day, are living in an age when world agriculture
is not able to meet the nutritional needs of a rapidly growing
world population. Much depends upon our capacity to cope with
problems of deficient or excessive water supply.

Nature's Way

A detailed study of irrigation must await another month.
It is a matter of great significance in the Canadian west.
Prodigies are being performed there, not only in great schemes
affecting thousands of acres but in the building of little
individual farm dams and dugouts. A whole new life is opening
up for western plains farmers, a development which will take
our whole 3,500 wordspace to summarize in a future article.

It is necessary, however, to draw from this present survey
of the importance of water in our lives, some lesson and perhaps
hint at a plan for water conservation. The plan we have in
mind is nature's way.

The most damaging impact of civilized man on his environment
is the shattering of the water cycle. In the wilderness of
Canada, before the coming of the white man, there was built
up a mutual society of balance among the waters, soils, grasses,
forests and all animal life.

How it operated is well told in Canadian Restoration
by Mr. NewtonWhite: To this society each member
contributed its powers of control and protection, and was
in turn itself controlled and protected. In result the streams
and rivers ran clear, cold and constant, and carried away,
with little disturbance, the surplus water left after all
the demands of the natural reservoirs and animal and vegetable
life had been satisfied.

But we have broken off our contact with nature, hiding behind
our mechanistic contraptions with a sense of security that
is false. We harvest grain, grind flour and bake bread by
machinery and electric power, but forget that the materials
of a pound loaf have used up almost two tons of water. We
use square miles of corn either to eat on the cob or to feed
our livestock, without remembering that an acre of corn in
its growing season transpires 3,000 tons of water, equal to
about 15 inches of rainfall.

In thinking about food, let us start with the one essential
ingredient: water. In thinking about soil conservation, let
us start with the element which is the greatest friend or
most ruthless foe of soil formation: water. And in thinking
about water, let us start, not at the tap or at the rivermouth,
but away back where the flow begins, on the mountain tops
and the hillsides.

No Mean Objective

Control and conservation of the water resources of our western
plains - the breadbasket of the world, as we are fond of calling
them - begins on the slopes of the Rockies. Serious depletion
of forests there increases the rate of spring flooding and
sends cascading down rivers the water that should seep into
the ground to maintain our underground reservoirs.

There's no use in spending huge sums on river control and
valley development unless it is accompanied by a thoroughly
effective attack on the needless evil of forest devastation.
Wellmanaged forests are the best of all soil and water
holders. A record was kept of more than 100 storms in a period
of two years on the Appalachian watersheds. It showed that
the flow of water from deforested areas during floods ranged
from ten to twenty times greater than that from forested areas.
Small streams from forested land are usually continuous, but
streams often dry up between rains on unforested land.

Forests act as balance wheels. In the dry seasons the water
stored in the soil dribbles out in springs and streams, and
the water table is kept up in adjacent lands. Forests may
not increase the total rainfall, but certainly they help to
dispose of it more fruitfully than does land without forests.

This is not to say that we need go to the extreme of taking
land out of agricultural use to be reforested, though some
of this may be needed. A wise use of land is to be aimed at,
in accord with its natural aptitude.

Huge dams and reservoirs are glamorous things. These monumental
masses of concrete, as A. H. Carhart calls them in his article
in The Atlantic of February, are expected to serve
irrigation, control floods, and produce power - all good objectives.
But with sick watersheds above, the days of such dams are
numbered.

Conserving water nature's way is no mean objective. To unriddle
the subtle aspects of the soilwaterplantanimal
complex offers the natural sciences an exciting cooperative
adventure. To persuade men of the wisdom of cooperation
and forwardlooking, slighting their immediate gain for
the good of all, is an objective worthy of the best in the
social sciences. To deal wisely with the varying needs of
agriculture and industry in the present and for the future:
that is a challenge to governments worthy of the best that
is in them.